Earlier this evening we celebrated my dad’s 82nd birthday using the appropriate COVID-19 social distancing approach. St. Patrick’s day has always been a special day for my family because of my dad’s birthday. Ever since I was a little kid I can remember the outrageous green outfits with the green buttons and the green bangles and a bunch of other green things my dad would drag around each year on March 17th.

As the world shifts underneath us around Covid-19, Amy and I have focused our immediate philanthropic efforts on our local community in Boulder County. If you have the ability to contribute anything philanthropically, helping locally will make a huge difference right now. While many of us are hunkered down at home, we’ve got numerous frontline providers at hospitals and in the community out in public helping us all get through this.

St. Patrick’s Day (tomorrow – 3/17) has always been a big holiday for us because it’s also my dad’s birthday. This year we are celebrating it remotely. We are doing a Zoom call together at 6pm MT to have a birthday cake, sing happy birthday, and hang out as a family from three different locations (my parents, my brother’s family, and us.) I’m an incredibly strong proponent of immediate social distancing. My last three blog posts have been about this and initiatives that I – and my partners at Foundry – are advocating:

Following is a poem titled Pandemic written by Lynn Ungar on 3/11/20. Thanks to Joanna Rupp at the University of Chicago for sending it to me. I like to read poetry out loud. It slows me down enough to relish the words. Lynn, I don’t know you, but you wrote a beautiful poem that hopefully helps a lot of us in this moment. Pandemic What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath— the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Center down. And when your body has become still, reach out with your heart. Know that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. (You could hardly deny it now.) Know that our lives are in one another’s hands. (Surely, that has come clear.) Do not reach out your hands. Reach out your heart. Reach out your words. Reach out all the tendrils of compassion that move, invisibly, where we cannot touch. Promise this world your love– for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, so long as we all shall live. –Lynn Ungar 3/11/20

A coalition of 250 CEOs and leaders (and growing by the hour) are asking our fellow business and civic leaders around America to #LeadBoldly and #StoptheSpread of COVID-19. We as leaders are doing the following, and asking other leaders to join us: Immediately change our organization’s policies to “work from home” for all employees where possible, including leaders. Do everything we can to support our frontline workforce, our first responders and our healthcare workers, as they show up for work and fight this on the frontlines. Ask our employees to stop hosting or attending voluntary/social public events of ANY size Free up time on our calendars to support our state and local communities as we move through this crisis

By this point, I expect everyone who reads this blog is extremely familiar with the phrases “flatten the curve” and “social distancing.” If not, read Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now right now. In the US, many schools are having spring break for a week sometime in the next two weeks. Ironically, it’s convenient timing for taking action that could dramatically flatten the curve. What if we decided, as a nation, to take Spring Break at Home for the next two weeks. If you haven’t canceled your spring break trip, cancel it. Stay home with your family. Spend time together. If you’ve already taken spring break, extend the concept of it through the end of the month.

I’ve been involved with a number of leaders in the Colorado tech community since Wednesday morning as we’ve aggressively mobilized to address the Covid-19 crisis. Following is a joint statement that a bunch of us have signed on to. A group of us are working quickly to create more mechanisms for a coordinated response, collective action, funding for critical resources, and ideas for things to do that will have a positive impact.

The following from C. S. Lewis. was on my fraternity email list this morning. It was written in 1948 after the dawn of the atomic age. In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In the midst of a crisis like the Covid-19 one that is unfolding around the world, it’s very hard to separate the signal from the noise. In the US, we are now in the thick of the aggressive expansion of infection from the virus, and we can look to a number of other countries for what they’ve done, how things have played out, and what has been effective. While it’s easy to find experts everywhere, and Twitter allows even those most unexpert authority figure to be an expert, I’m continuously searching for signal and trying to discard or ignore the noise.